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Monday, 3 July 2017

UNPUBLISHED BLOG POSTS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I came in here - and here means Blogger - to publish a blog I'd written up. Then I remembered, that blog post was something I worked on for LATER USE. Couldn't publish it, not just yet. And this sent me on a quest to write of something else instead. What, though? I started counting unpublished blogs. There are sixteen unused bullets dotted throughout the list of posts.

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Why aren't they published? Several fall under the category of things I am working on...things I can't talk about just yet. I'd say half a dozen blog posts are in that line of work. One is an obituary for Harlan Ellison. It's difficult to publish that sort of item while the old fart is still alive. Another is an obituary for a writer who disappeared off the internet, and I was about two weeks from publishing it when, lo, there was a miraculous recovery from death. Awkward. Three were about the dreaded Table of Contents, formatting issues with electronic books, and problems with Amazon Kindle. This small series on difficulties with formatting...felt too topical at the time. I had the sense that industry-level problems would be overcome in no time at all. And my instinct was right. There might be something worth salvaging from those three blog posts. Something of use in the longer term. But I don't see how to convert the pieces into something coherent. Well. Damn.

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And that leaves a few isolated blog posts on random topics. Comic books. A singer, and her one song that I liked - leading me to conclude that I'd never buy any of her albums. But that blog post was meant to slide majestically into the subject of writing. And it never quite did.

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Okay. Why leave these items unpublished on the blog? There's an option to delete. Why not take it? Recycling. I've gone back to short stories and inflated them to novel-length. Never throw anything away, if you are a writer. That scrappy piece of nonsense might come back...not to taunt you, or haunt you, but to inspire you from out of the depths. Obviously, I'm glossing over the novel I shredded. But even with that novel, I made sure to save the one section of it that was halfway decent. And I could still reconstruct the book from memory, with a second stab at that story. Recycling. Using the unpublished blog posts in a different way. Even if a blog post is timely and its time comes and goes too quickly to be of use, there might be a kernel in there that adds a crumb or two to a different cake at a later date. Don't recycle crumbs that way. I won't be eating out of your kitchen.

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Life goes on. And it ends. So there'll be an obituary for Harlan Ellison one day. It's not a piece of writing that praises him, just so you know.OVERLY-LITIGIOUS OLD GROPER HARLAN ELLISON IS DEAD. Just giving you a sense of how that one pans out.

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Blog posts are sometimes, like this one, slapped down and published. It's important to write things and put them out there as soon as they are written. (Though I had to wrestle with a formatting glitch that shrank the first line of each new section, delaying publication by a few minutes. Damn you, Blogger! I was making a point about near-instant publishing, and you tried to steal my coffee.) On other occasions, a greater degree of planning is required. You force yourself to blog about complex things that haven't happened yet - things that won't happen for AN AGE. And that is one way to force yourself to get those advanced plans seen to. Now I must away, into the grey day, to see to those advanced plans.